Across East Asia, 1500-1800 was a time of sweeping political, social and economic change.

This transformation was experienced differently across the region - which here is taken to include China, Korea, Japan and the frontier along China's northern periphery - but clearly points to a phenomenon that is interlinked and regional in scope.

Religious violence encompasses a diverse set of phenomena. The most obvious manifestation is political repression by states against religious com­petitors or dissenters. But violence is also a part of religion itself. It appears in the exploration of moral issues such as just war and divine retribution, as well as of metaphysical issues such as sacred time, and cycles of cosmic birth and destruction. Religious actors themselves may use violence to suppress here­tics within their own ranks, or to intimidate non-believers, rival communities or even the state itself. These manifestations of religious violence are not isolated, but rather points on a continuum that interact with and influence each other. Religious violence grows out of theological conceptions of when violence is acceptable, or even divinely commanded, but as a social phenom­enon, it is often a response to external pressures such as political repression.

I would like to thank Oded Abt, Kiri Paramore, Nikolas Broy, Hongyan Xiang, and Luman Wang for their comments on earlier drafts of this chapter.

To understand the varied expressions of religious violence in early modern East Asia, it is necessary to take in this entire spectrum of phenomena.